My Routines Thus Far

I'm sure everyone is wondering, well how are you doing coming off those seizure medications?  Well, I stopped taking the keppra on Tuesday morning.  I forgot my pill, but then I realized that I just need to implement the things on http://normalbreathing.com.  While I am excited to do this, it is quite scary.  I have been doing the breathing exercises for almost three months.  I slowly lowered my seizure medication and while I did have a couple seizures, the intensity went down.  I recovered after five minutes.  The time also went down.  The most recent ones were less than twenty seconds.  My average seizure usually lasted one minue.

The amazing thing about allowing myself to come off medication is that I now have auras!  I start to feel a little funny prior to the seizure.  This is a nice warning to go lie down in a safe place.  It also gave me an idea of my seizure pattern.  I wasn't having daily seizures when I started having them.  Increasing the dosage of medication every time that I had a seizure meant that I was very drugged up even on days that I wasn't likely to have a seizure.  My doctor was really just guessing at the cause.  I have noticed that sometimes I will feel an aura and slow my breathing down.  The aura feeling will quickly go away as I slow down the breathing.  I have noticed this twice. 

I've decided to up my workouts to meet the amount of time needed to oxygenate my blood to match what a 40 second morning CP.  That is two hours a day!  A morning control pause is how long you can pause your breathing without any stress.  I find it very difficult to measure this.  I think that perhaps I am measuring it wrong.  The Buteyko breathing exercises are something that I try to do, but since I feel like I'm doing them wrong, I ended up buying a BreathSlim breathing exercise device.  I also purchased a convenient UltraBreathe device to carry with me in my purse and do whenever I have time.  So far, I have worked up to an hour of breathing exercises with the device.  It is very comfortable and I do them while watching television.  I chose to do them first thing in the morning, since that is when seizures are most likely to occur due to heavy night breathing. 

While it is my goal to get a 40 second morning CP, I may be about at 20 seconds at best.  I have only been able to increase my workout hours to an hour and a half.  I try to walk the dog for about half an hour and do a morning cardio workout at 6am with Gilad on Discovery Fit and Health.  I used to be  a huge Pilates fan, but I'm trying to maximize oxygenation and have switched to aerobics for that.  It is ok.  I can feel my lungs getting more powerful.